Pointing Fingers at 'The Media'

The Bundestagswahl 2017 and Rise of the AfD

The German election in September 2017 brought a tectonic shift to the layout of German politics. With the AfD in parliament far-right illiberalism has reached the mainstream. We investigate the communicative developments underlying this rise. Using web-scraping and automated content analysis, we collected over 10.000 articles from mainstream-news and far-right blogs, along with over 90GBs of Tweets and thousands of Facebook-Posts. This allows us a deep insight into how public discourse works in 2017 Germany.